A Gesture Life Read online

  I’m on the lookout for Renny Banerjee, actually, who called me earlier this morning to chat. He sensed my less-than-ebullient mood, and thus determined to take the afternoon off to visit me. I told him that I would be at the town pool, which he gleefully misread as a romantic meeting (for I had gone there only once, for a town event with Mary Burns), but when I told him I was watching a friend’s boy, he was curiously unprobing, as if he knew the legacies of my complications. But he also mentioned something he was supposed to tell me concerning a woman named Hickey.

  “Mrs. Hickey?” I said to Renny, hardly able to speak aloud the words. “Is it that her boy…is it something about him?”

  “The boy? Oh, no, Doc. It’s not the boy.”

  “Thank goodness. He has a serious heart condition, you know, Renny. He’s in the PICU.”

  “I recall that now. No, Doc, it’s about his mother. Apparently she was brought in last night to the emergency room. I’m sorry to have to tell you this. A nurse there told me you sort of knew her, and that I should probably tell you.”

  “Yes.”

  “She was in a car accident last night driving home from the hospital. I guess the other driver was drunk. She didn’t really have a chance, that’s how fast he was likely going.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She died soon after the paramedics brought her in. I’m awfully sorry, Doc. I don’t really know much more than that. Gee, Doc, was she a good friend?”

  “No, not really. She was an associate,” I think I said.

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “That’s quite all right, Renny.”

  “Listen, Doc, I’ll try to see you this afternoon. I have to go now. Will you be okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I told him, and after some more chat we agreed to try to meet here at the pool. There was another thing he wanted to mention, but it wasn’t so important and could wait.

  But later, as I drove on an errand before going to Sunny’s apartment in Ebbington to pick up Thomas, I began to find the information about Mrs. Hickey so profoundly untenable that for a few minutes I had to park along the side of the road with the engine shut off and the windows rolled up. The cars were steadily whizzing by me on the narrow two-way of Route 9, the muffled slingshot of their passing buffeted by the safety glass. I wondered which tight suburban road it was, if not this very one, that Anne Hickey should not have driven on late at night when everyone knows the saloon revelers would be speeding to the next place. I wondered why she hadn’t known to stay at home with her husband or in the intensive-care ward with her son, that good people like her should take the most extreme caution with themselves and practice wariness and avoidance for the sake of their beloved, and then, too, for the rest of us. And sitting at the wheel I became angry all at once, angry at her lack of care and circumspection, and if she had been in the passenger seat looking at me with her comely palish-pink face and sea-blue eyes, I would have scolded her as hotly as I wished to scold Sunny when she was a teen. But I found myself instead struggling for breath, the simple draw of it, my still weakened lungs smarting with each gasp, and whatever life-spirit I possessed at that moment I felt desperate to abdicate, if but for empathy and the wish for a penance that would likely never come.

  There was still some time before I had to get to Sunny’s, and so I made a U-turn in the road and drove to Bedley Run, through town and then up the road past my house, and I kept going up the hill until the very end of the street, where there is a small Catholic cemetery, the pedestrian entrance to which is bowered by a delicate wrought-iron arch. It is pretty, and modest, like the well-tended plots inside the grounds. The elevation is high enough that from most every spot—at least on a clear day—you can almost make out the city skyline to the south, the high spires looming like the far parapets of a strange, empyreal country. And then, in the middle distance, when you view the dense overlay of towns and villages laid out in contiguous patches, the multiple strands of the interstates and the parkways running straight through the heart of some and bending deferentially around others, bounded and marked by the shimmering waterways and reservoirs and the gently sloped hills, you feel as though this place in which you stand is a most decent and comely kingdom, even as it is a solemn province of the dead.

  The monuments are mostly severe and plain, and even the few miniature mausoleums are unadorned, dignified structures, squarish blocks of polished black granite fitted with engine-turned doors of patinated brass. As I gloomily thought of Anne Hickey and her unsettling, instantaneous end, I remembered, too, with a start, that it was in one of these tombs that the Dr. Bradley Burnses resided.

  Mary Burns didn’t altogether favor the tomb her husband had pre-built for them. She would have preferred a simple set of headstones over any free-standing structure, but of course she was always typically dutiful and made sure to keep up its appearance. One spring day I accompanied her to help her plant several evergreen shrubs on either side of the tomb’s door. I called the owner of the local nursery to deliver the plants to the cemetery entrance, and Mary Burns and I each rolled a wheelbarrow up Mountview Street to pick them up. We must have appeared quite a pair, dressed in our heavy canvas gardening trousers and work shirts beneath our wide-brimmed sun hats, clodding along in black rubber boots like an odd pair of itinerant landscapers. Though part of me was distracted by the idea that our neighbors might be peering out their windows at us, wondering what the exact nature of our relationship was, I was also, to be honest, almost discomfitingly flushed with a sensation I had not believed I would ever experience again. For even as we set about the work of sprucing up her late husband’s gravesite, with all the typically complicated specters and notions attending such a task, I was in fact nearly giddy, and I believe she was as well. We were happily basking, as one might say, in the warm glow of our passion, our union still in the early, intimate weeks when there is not yet talk of past or future days but only the too-swift dwindle of the hours.

  That day we walked up to the cemetery we didn’t go directly in, as the nursery truck hadn’t yet arrived with the delivery of shrubs. I sat on a bench to wait, but Mary Burns suggested we leave the wheelbarrows inside the wrought-iron gates of the entrance and take a brief hike on an old bridle path, whose almost completely hidden trailhead was a block or so back down the hill. I thought we should wait for the delivery, in case the driver was unsure of what to do, but she tugged at my hand and cajoled and even pecked me on the cheek, and soon enough I agreed.

  It was clear that the trail was hardly used anymore, if at all. Mary Burns said that many years ago there were a number of people in the neighborhood who kept horses, and that you could see them on the weekends strutting up Mountview, fathers and daughters in rustic dress setting out for a day-long ride. Over time the riders had fashioned a clear path, which went up over Bedley Hill and down the far side, where it meandered through several square miles of undeveloped county land. I was surprised to learn that Mary Burns often took solitary walks here for hours at a time, and that she hadn’t until now invited me along. I was also a bit concerned for her as it grew quite isolated the farther we went, the path narrowing steadily until it was no wider than a deer trail, with the ever-thickening underbrush tugging at our trouser cuffs. For even here in Bedley Run, something terrible could occur, in a place like this all cloistered and shady. A certain kind of man could happen upon her in her light cotton sweater and willowy walking shorts and think he was exempt from the prevailing laws, that everything in the domain was his to master.

  After we’d hiked a quarter mile or so, I said, “You don’t find it a little dark back here?”

  “Are you trying to scare me, Franklin?” she said lightly, her eyes archly narrowed. “Because you should know I don’t frighten easily.”

  “I’m not trying anything of the kind,” I answered. “It just is very much removed here. Our street seems already to be miles away. There aren’t any sounds but ours.”

  “That’s why I like it.”
/>   “How far do you usually go?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, continuing to lead us. I was following closely behind her, the faint scent of perfume trailing her in the damp, spring air. “I don’t keep track, I guess. But don’t worry, I know where we’re headed to.”

  “I don’t mind, Mary. Wherever you take us…”

  “I’m glad,” she said, suddenly turning about. She put her hands up to brace herself but I ran straight into her. She went down with a crash, instinctively grabbing a branch of a sapling that snapped and tore along the trunk as she fell. I felt awful, even as she was fitfully laughing, and I knelt to examine her. She had a trickling nosebleed, and her eyes were teary, and I had her lean against my shoulder, her head tipped back.

  “My goodness, that was a surprise.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mary. It’s my fault.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, her hand around my knee. I could feel her letting all of her weight ease back into my chest. “Brainy me did the about-face. Will I be getting two black eyes now?”

  “I’m sure you won’t. Does this hurt?” I gently pressed my fingers against the bridge of her nose. She didn’t flinch. The blood was still coming, though in tiny rivulets, and as I had nothing to stanch it with I unbuttoned the cuff of my work shirt and she nodded that I go ahead. We stayed a minute or so that way, her face nestled into my forearm, and had someone come upon us in the narrow path, with the bright blood soaked into my sleeve, they might have thought I was attempting to snuff the life out of her. And the strange thing is that I kept having the thought that I was, or at least imagining the horror of it, for even as every cell of me was reaching toward her with utter tenderness and warmth and the drug of an amorous bloom, it seemed I could just as easily summon the harshest want in my hands, the tightness and pressure that might have no bound. And if some keenly sick man could have committed the act in a flash, for reason of mere possibility or nihilistic whim or curiosity, a man like me would have done so for the avoidance of a future day, whose complications—whether happy or not—might simply overwhelm.

  But she tightly embraced me then, turning her face into my neck. She cupped my cheek and she kissed me, deeply, with an instant fervor. Her fingers ran through my hair, along the back of my head. Before this we had held hands and hugged each other after a dinner out or a movie at the village theater, and I’d only politely kissed her good night, despite her clear willingness to linger in the car or before her front door. She would invite me in but I always made the excuse of having to go home to Sunny, which was true enough, though not because I was needed there. In those first weeks with Mary Burns I was still hoping to provide my daughter with a complete family life, and while it was obvious how nearly perfect Mary would be as a mother, how well she could run a house (even mine), I began to wonder if I were up to the tasks of being a worthy partner and husband. I worried whether I knew what to do, like any pubescent boy might be concerned, for honestly it had been quite a long time, long enough that I was as fearful as I was anxious and expectant. But that afternoon, on the impromptu hike, she held me tight and wouldn’t let me go and at some point I began not just to relent but to kiss her back, and with a sudden, spurring ebullience that caught us both off guard.

  “You’re such a surprise,” she said, when we finally ceased for a moment. “Come with me.”

  She got up and started walking the path again, in the direction we had been hiking.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Where we were headed.”

  “But what’s there?”

  “You’ll see. Just come on.”

  She was going more quickly than before, almost running, and soon enough we found ourselves in a silly bit of a chase, her slowing down until I could reach and touch her and then rushing forward again, the two of us acting a third or perhaps a tenth of our years. She disappeared around a turn and when I reached the spot, she was no longer ahead of me. I called out and she answered, and when I looked down I saw a small opening within a thicket.

  “Come inside,” she said.

  “Shouldn’t we go back? The nursery man must be there by now.”

  “Please, Franklin. Don’t be a spoilsport.”

  I got on my hands and knees and crawled in. It was a small place, open to the sky, a lair that must have been used by deer. Mary Burns sat on the tall, matted grass.

  “I think high-school kids sometimes come here at night,” she said. “But don’t worry. I sit here all the time, and no one has ever come by during the afternoon. Today’s a school day, you know.”

  Of course I did know. I’d decided, for the first time ever, to close the shop after a half day in order to be with her.

  I said, “I’m not worried at all, Mary.”

  “Then let’s sit next to each other again, just like before.”

  And so we did. And we began to kiss, and eventually our hands were purposefully exploring each other, lingering and caressing and soon enough undoing buttons, clasps. It would have been scandalous in town had someone caught us. But it didn’t seem that we cared. We were only half-clothed in the open-air cloister, and if it hadn’t been so patently unshaded and bright we might have done something right there and then that was quite extreme, and perhaps even wonderful. For I am almost sure she wanted me to make love to her, this by the open, willing character of her body, and then by the strength of her limbs, the way she so tightly wound my legs with hers. It was as if a vast store of energy had been held inside her, bounding about in a terribly long, great waiting, such an abeyance really being the most lovely thing to me, and harrowing as well. For I did desperately want to make love to her; she was so wonderfully pretty lying there beneath me looking up, her silvery-streaked flaxen hair loosened from the headband and splayed against the grass like a fan of shimmering, threaded light. Beautiful, too, I thought, were the many fine creases and lines in her rosy face, the supreme paleness of her lips, and then the fresh smell of her, faintly sour-sweet like unripe plums. I felt awfully young, touching her, and the wanting I had wished never again to know was rushing back to me, a disturbing shiver in my fingers and in my mouth and in my eyes.

  I stopped everything then, perhaps too abruptly, for Mary Burns had the impression that she had done something terribly offending or wrong, and I knew I could not convince her otherwise, at least for the moment. We quickly dressed and without speaking hiked back to the cemetery entrance, where the delivery man was waiting with two pairs of evergreen shrubs. He insisted on helping us wheelbarrow them inside, and doing some digging as well, and I was glad that he was there, and even Mary Burns seemed relieved. In fact we never spoke again of what had happened. And though in near time we did sleep together (with a genuinely pleasing, if sober, conviviality), I came to think of that first interlude with a somewhat sorrowful fondness, for I saw that our days together were perhaps sullied from the very beginning and all the way through, right up to the last.

  * * *

  NOW, MY GRANDSON THOMAS, overfilled with energy and pluck, runs up the short beach holding out his inflatable water wings and dumps them in my lap. He doesn’t need them anymore, he insists, this after a mere week of pool-going. Soon enough he’s practically performing for his newfound friends, as he holds high aloft a bucket of sand and with some ceremony dumps it on his face and neck and chest. I’m a bit alarmed, but the other children laugh at this, and Thomas repeats the action and I realize I’ve seen this from him before, how he often makes a buffoon of himself for others. At the roller rink last week, he spilled wickedly several times, falling flush on his back as he tried to whip around a group of children his age, each wipeout a bit more thunderous than the one before. They snickered, but then seemed more frightened by him than amused; soon after they were ushered off by their mothers. As I was watching from the stands I could only shout my warnings to him, but once they were gone he was perfectly fine as he skated, whipping past my spot with aplomb and cool abandon, his stout little figure apparently unaching, unhurt. A
nother time, in the toy store, a floor display of boxed firetrucks fell over on him, though I suspected at the time that he had meant to cause it, if not expected them to fall directly on him.

  But now I’m deeply worried, having sensed the strangeness in the pattern, his obsessive, self-taunting behavior, and I get up from my folding chair and go over and hold him as I brush the sand from his hair, his thick eyebrows and lashes. He pulls hard away from me.

  “What are you doing?” he says, jerking his arm away from me. There’s a flash in his eyes that perhaps only I as his mother’s father can recognize, a cold light of refusal.

  “That’s not good for you,” I say, lamely. “The sand will get in your eyes. It could injure them.”

  “I’m having fun,” he answers resolutely, filling up another bucket. For the first time in our two weeks of knowing each other I am not having so much fun, though still a great part of me wishes him to go on, to do whatever he wants no matter what I might say.

  “Perhaps we should get back to the water. Why don’t we all go in? You and your friends can have a splashing contest.”

  “Hey! We don’t just splash, mister, we swim just fine!” one of them shouts, a girl with hundreds of white plastic beads woven into her hair.